y - - q - é;> /;:) . '1 know everybody here except the couple in the soup tureen. " . built the V errazano- Narrows Bridge, the Triborough Bridge, the Henry Hudson Parkway, the Henry Hudson Bridge, the Southern and Northern State Parkways, the Grand Central Parkway, the Cross Island Parkway, the Bronx- Whitestone Bridge, the Throgs Neck Bridge, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, the Long Island Expressway, the Meadowbrook Parkway, and the Saw Mill River Parkway. He built Jones Beach State Park (an early masterwork), Orchard Beach, the Niagara and St. Lawrence power projects, the New York Coliseum, and the 1964 World's Fair. By his own count, Moses added six hundred and fifty-eight playgrounds and seventeen public swimming pools to the New York City park system. In Central Park, he added the Conserva- tory Garden, the Great Lawn, and the Zoo. He played a major role in the cre- ation of Shea Stadium, Stuyvesant Town, Lenox Terrace, Park West Village, Lin- coln Towers, Kips Bay Plaza, Washing- ton Square Village, and Co-op City. At one point, Moses held twelve N ew York City and New York State positions si- multaneously. He served under seven governors and five mayors, and a popu- lar joke had it that Moses wasn't work- ing for them so much as they were serv- ing under Moses. Even more significant, perhaps, than 84 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 5, 2007 . Moses's productivity is the fact that he was one of the first people to look at New York City not as an isolated ur- ban zone but as the central element in a sprawling region. In the early nineteen- thirties, he would charter small planes and fly back and forth across the metro- politan area to get a better sense of re- gional patterns. His vision ofN ew York was of an integrated system with an ur- ban center, a suburban ring, and a se- ries of huge public recreational areas, all connected by parkways. Although the Regional Plan Association had pro- posed looking at the metropolitan area that way in 1929, Moses was the only public official who both grasped region- alism as a concept and had the ability to do something about it-which meant not only transcending local politics but also figuring out ways to pay for huge projects. He did this by establishing a series of public authorities, which al- lowed him to issue public bonds at fa- vorable rates while leaving him with nearly as much autonomy as he would have had if he were running a private corporation. He moved among his var- ious offices via a fleet of limousines- the highway-builder never learned to drive. His home base was in the head- quarters of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, a small building on Randall's Island, nestled under the T ri- borough Bridge, where he held court in lavish offices that were hidden from public view. I t is this image of Moses-unseen, om- nipotent-that dominates Caro's bi- ography. Thirty years after its publica- tion, the book remains remarkable both for its exhaustive research and for its al- most Shakespearean scale and complex- ity. At the same time, it can be melodra- matic ("He had learned the lesson of power. And now he grabbed for power with both hands"), and it sometimes un- deremphasizes the extent to which, ex- traordinary as he was, Moses was still a product of his time. Caro points out, for example, how many subway improve- ments could have been bought with the money Moses spent on highways, but in Moses's day cities all over the country were building highways at the expense of mass transit, and N ew York was far from the worst. Some critics, like Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, were complaining that highways damaged urban neighbor- hoods, but most people didn't see this until long after the damage had been d M ,. f " b al " one. oses s VIew 0 ur an renew was no different from that of officials elsewhere, and in some ways it was far more imaginative. Moses didn't bring down New York, and he didn't single- handedly sell its soul to the automobile. Indeed, N ew York probably comes closer to having a workable balance between cars and mass transit than any other city in the country. One of Caro's most damaging accu- sations is that Moses was motivated by racism both in his designs for certain projects and in his decisions about what neighborhoods would be given priority for new parks and pools. In an interview with Paul Windels, a colleague of Moses, Caro turns up the bizarre detail that Moses believed that black people pre- ferred warm water and decided to use this supposed fact to deter them from using a particular pool in East Harlem: 'While heating plants at the other swim- ming pools kept the water at a comfort- able seventy degrees, at the Thomas Jefferson Pool, the water was left un- heated." The essays in the exhibition cat- alogue go into the issue of racism in some detail but do little to rebut Caro's claims. They show a willingness to give Moses the benefit of the doubt, where doubt ex-